Every time I walk into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum the want and the desire come flooding back: I covet the tree ferns. There are four, one in each corner of the grand central courtyard, and each one towers upward, stretching to the ceiling windows and unfurling their magnificent fronds over the space, offering delicate shade and gorgeous designs of green against the soft-hued stone. They immediately induce peace, halting the rush of everyday life and hushing the noise of the outside world. They echo a time gone by, when we paused to indulge in simply existing, when it was enough to sit on a bench and just be. Of course, they go back to long before then too, when a different terrain was in place and when ancient species roamed the land.
I’m told there are some places where these hardy denizens have colonized and become ubiquitous to the point of invasiveness. That’s certainly not the case in upstate New York or New England, where one fall’s day could easily fell the tallest fern. And so we place them inside, coddled and pampered in the greenhouse environs they prefer. That may make my personal cultivation of them an impossibility, seeing as how I do not live in a humid greenhouse, nor have access to a sun room where such conditions might be approximated. Still, if I happen to find a small specimen at Faddegon’s I may give it a whirl. Who knows, our living room might provide just enough light to make a pleasing home. It certainly works for us.
